


pineapple and olives on pizza

by Rhyolite



Series: magic & bananas [3]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, Gen, He doesn't do it, Magical Realism, There was more magical realism but the characters said no we want a movie night instead, Warning for the fact that Jehan can control people by using magic to control their bones, and it's discussed, but that's a thing, so i'm warning for it, so now there is this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-30 09:08:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17825894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhyolite/pseuds/Rhyolite
Summary: Jehan's phone plays his text tone for Grantaire: an ominous rumbling noise that vaguely resembles the sound a landslide might make if it was made out of a combination of Christmas ornaments, cinder blocks, skeins of yarn, and hand bells. It's a very unique sound. According to Grantaire, Eponine wants to know if she can bring Gavroche over tonight.Or, monthly movie night, featuring multiple cooking competition shows and a massive fireball.





	pineapple and olives on pizza

Ulna  winds her way around Jehan's ankles, purring. Tarsal watches from the back of the couch, draped over an Italian dictionary, her tail dripping into a potted succulent. Tibia, Navicular, and Thyroid are probably in one of the other rooms. The five cats are Joly's, really, but since Bossuet is mildly allergic, and the lease on the house that Joly shares with Grantaire, Bossuet and Musichetta doesn't allow pets, they live with Jehan, because Jehan's landlady doesn't care about cats, for some reason. She's probably never met Joly's cats.

 

Jehan laughs, and scratches Ulna's chin before setting his bag of groceries on the counter, and starting to put them away in the cupboard and refrigerator.

 

"Where are your teapots?" Joly asks, holding up a tin of tea bags. "I want to to have some tea before we start setting up your apartment for monthly movie night."

 

Jehan focuses, and makes the model skeleton in the corner point to the correct cupboard so that he doesn't have to put down the armful of fruit he's currently balancing in precarious piles inside of his refrigerator. Tarsal is used to the skeleton moving, so she just swats the skeleton. "Over there. Make me some, too?"

 

Joly almost jumps, but manages to only flinch. "That's _real?"_

 

Jehan laughs again, and passes him the teapot. "Nope. Napoleon's fake."

 

Joly's eyes narrow. "I thought you could only control real bone."

 

Jehan shrugs. "Turns out that if it looks vaguely like something that I can control, then I can control it if I convince myself that I should be able to control it. It's complicated, and probably won't work if I think about it too hard. But it means I can control Napoleon."

 

Joly nods, and pours water into the teapot and puts it on the stove. "Huh. I wonder if something like that would happen if I tried to convince myself that air... Wait, _Napoleon?_ " 

 

Jehan grins. "Marius named him, when he was reading a lot about the Napoleonic Wars last month."

 

Joly laughs. "Does Enjolras know? About the name, I mean?"

 

"Not yet," Jehan says. He slowly closes the door of the refrigerator. _Don't fall, don't fall,_ he thinks at the fruit. If only they had bones. "Don't mention it when he comes over. Or Grantaire. Grantaire would tell him, if only to see his reaction."

 

"I won't," Joly promises, and migrates over to sit on the couch with his mug of tea, which is strewn with notebooks and books and pens and various dictionaries. "Should I move this, or..." he trails off, gesturing to the mounds of creative process.

  
  


"Yeah," Jehan says, and scoops up an armful. Joly follow suit, putting his tea on the old-fashioned suitcase that Jehan found at a thrift store and decided would make the _perfect_ end table. "Just dump it in here for now, on my bed."

 

Joly follows Jehan to his bedroom, and carefully lays down his own armful, dislodging Tibia and Navicular. (Navicular gives a disappointed screech, but rubs his face against Joly's hands anyway when Joly tries to pet him. Tibia just streaks into the kitchen in an angry blur.)

 

Jehan laughs.

 

"Thanks again for fostering them," Joly says, hands buried in Navicular’s fur.

 

"No problem," Jehan says. It isn't really: he likes the cats. Maybe he'll get a few when/if Joly's able to take them back. _Clavicle and Scapula,_ he thinks, _would make really good cat names, and continue in Joly’s tradition in naming them after bones. And glands._

 

His phone plays his text tone for Grantaire: an ominous rumbling noise that vaguely resembles the sound a landslide might make if it was made out of a combination of Christmas ornaments, cinder blocks, skeins of yarn, and hand bells. It's a very unique sound. According to Grantaire, Eponine wants to know if she can bring Gavroche over tonight.

 

_Of course,_ he texts back, _I'll tell Bahorel to pick a movie that's appropriate._

 

Joly blows a freezing draft across Jehan's fingers. "What was that?"

 

"I can't even use my own power on you," he says. "And you still use yours on me." 

 

Joly grins. "Benefit of not having my power not being all or nothing like yours," he says, but stops the breeze. "I can use it for little things like freezing people's fingers. What does Grantaire want?"

 

"He's just saying that Eponine wants to bring Gav."

 

"Oh, cool," Joly says, and sneezes. Jehan isn't entirely sure if it's only Bossuet who's mildly allergic to cats. Joly won't admit to any allergy, though, although he will cheerfully admit that since he rescued a bird from Thyroid he probably has rabies despite the fact that the bird never broke his skin, and birds probably don't carry rabies anyway.

 

"Anyway," Jehan says, "We should probably start getting ready for everyone else to come over."

 

"Yeah," Joly agrees. Setting up for a monthly movie night is no small task, after all.

 

They proceed to set up for the movie night, which mostly entails herding those cats that aren't already in the bedroom into the bedroom, setting up all of Jehan's considerable supply of extra blankets and pillows in his living room, and getting out snacks. 

 

They eat half the snacks as they're setting up, because what are snacks for if not eating?

 

They've just finished when Marius knocks on the door. Jehan can tell it's Marius, because Marius always knocks the same way: awkward and light, like he's going to break down the door if he hits it too hard. 

 

Jehan's heard stories about how Marius's grandfather dealt with Marius's tendency to break things that are all or mostly made of wood by subconsciously pulling the wood closer to him, or how he tried to teach Marius to work with fire like him instead of wood, and they all make him feel angry and like he wants to break his promise to himself never to use his power on a living person. He pushes that out of his mind right now.  _Revenge on evil grandfathers later._

 

He opens the door. It's Marius. "Hi, Marius," he says. "Come on in."

 

"Okay," Marius says, and follows Jehan in. "Am I early? Am I the only one here? Do you want me to come back in twenty minutes?"

Jehan smiles his best soothing smile, the one he perfected while watching commercials and looking at advertisements on the metro. It may not be entirely soothing. : Marius's anxiety does not visibly decline. "It's totally fine; Joly's here, too, and Grantaire just said that he and Bossuet and Musichetta and Eponine and Gavroche would be her soon, and I think that they're also picking up Bahorel and Feuilly." Frankly, Jehan isn't sure how the seven of them are all going to get to his apartment with the fact that none of them have especially large cars, and the nearest metro stop isn't actually that near. Which doesn't stop him from using it, but still.

 

"Oh, good," Marius says, and then sits up straighter, "Not that I don't like you two, or don't want to spend time with you! I like you two!"

 

"We like you, too," Jehan says. "Do you want something to drink?"

 

"No," Marius says. "Thanks. Uh, Cosette said that she'd be a little bit late and that we should start without her."

 

"Great," Jehan says, and gestures to the many snacks that Joly helped him set up. "Do you want any snacks?"

 

Marius eats some of he snacks.

 

The others get there a few minutes later, Bossuet, Musichetta, Eponine, Gavroche, Bahorel, Grantaire and Feuilly all somehow arriving at the same time. Looking at them all stuffed inside his tiny living room, Jehan starts to doubt whether volunteering to host this month's movie night was a good idea after all. _Well_ , he thinks as he watches Gavroche perch on the top of the sofa, _at least they can stack vertically._

 

Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac all arrive at the same time, which isn't a surprise, because they share an apartment and probably insisted on walking the twenty-five minutes to his apartment from the not-really-near-at-all metro station.

 

Someone orders pizza, and, after the obligatory arguments about toppings (" _Olives_ on pizza," Courfeyrac maintains, are an  _abomination._ "), Bossuet attempts to start the movie (stored on a DVD in a battered envelope) on Jehan's laptop. 

 

Jehan's laptop that, although secondhand, is still new enough that it doesn't have a CD slot.

 

Bahorel holds the DVD up. "Why doesn't your computer have a CD slot?"

 

"Because it's new," Jehan explains.

 

"Who can afford a computer new enough to not have a CD slot?" Grantaire asks from his spot on the sofa. Gavroche, Jehan notices, has somehow gotten a hold of Eponine's phone, and is doing ... something on it.

 

Jehan ignores him. The computer was a gift from his parents, after his very old prior one finnaly died. (Enjolras doesn't ignore Grantaire's comment, and Jehan's supprised to hear him agreeing with Grantaire. _Then again, they've been arguing less lately.)_ "I've got Netflix," he suggests. "We could watch something on there."

 

"Ooh," Cosette (who was only actually about five minutes late), says, "we could watch episodes of one of the cooking competition shows that they've got."

 

The buzzer rings. "I don't care what we watch," Eponine says, as she lazily twists wisps of smoke around her fingers, "as long as it's not stupid. I'll get the pizza."

 

The idea of a cooking show is met with enthusiasm that's not dulled by Bahorel's sad glances as the DVD he brought, now returned to its envelope, so Cosette logs into her Netflix account. "I've got a bunch saved; we can see which ones we want to watch."

 

Courfeyrac peers over Cosette’s shoulder, and nods approvingly. “I watch a bunch of these, too.”

 

Cosette laughs. “I watch them when I feel frustrated about something.”

 

“Me too,” Courfeyrac says. “Watching people almost light themselves on fire always helps me calm down.”

 

“Weird flex but okay,” Jehan hears Grantaire mutter. Gavroche kicks his him without looking up from Eponine’s phone.

 

Cosette laughs again. “Do you have any ideas for which one or ones we should watch?”

 

“We can either focus on one, or do a variety,” Courfeyrac muses, and then turns toward everyone else “What do you think? Focus one one series, or watch episodes from a few?”

 

“Variety,” Jehan says. “Variety is the spice of life: sometimes it makes it better, but sometimes it just burns your mouth. Best paired with other flavors. Hey, that’s a good metaphor! I should write it down!” he dives for a notebook, and finds one between the cushions of the couch. He grabs a pen from his pens-for-writing jar on the shelf above the couch (different than the pens-for-aesthetic jar, the contents of which he sometimes, but rarely uses.  _ Ink blots don’t always make a poem better, just more illegible _ , he thinks, and then writes that down as well. Who knows? It could be useful.)

 

“The host has voted,” Bahorel says.

 

“Is anyone  _ not _ happy with a variety?” Enjolras asks from next to Grantaire. They’ve been slowly creeping closer to each other for the past half hour. Jehan doesn’t mention it: if he did, he’s pretty sure that they would both sit up and deny everything.

 

“I’m fine with it,” Musichetta says.

 

“Me too,” Joly agrees. 

 

Everyone else responds along those terms as well. If he were writing a poem about it, Jehan thinks, he’d have to take out some of the repetitive sounds that twelve people make when agreeing to something.

 

Once Eponine's back, arms piled high with pizza and a few floating beside her, they've queued up twelve episodes of various cooking/baking competition shows. 

 

“Pizza with  _ pineapple _ ,” she shudders, “is this stack. The pizza for us sane individuals is this one.  _ Olives, _ ” she looks at Combeferre and then at Jehan, “are all the way over there.’

 

“Yum,” Gavroche says, and helps himself to three slices from the with-pineapple pile. 

 

Eponine shudders, and grabs a pineapple-free slice. “What’re we watching?”

 

“Cooking competition shows!” Cosette announces. 

 

“I’m sure that there’s a better name for them,” Combeferre says, “But I don’t know what it is.”

 

That’s how they end up not only watching cooking competition shows  _ far _ to late into the night, but also  _ arguing  _ over cooking competition shown far to late into the night. 

 

Still, at lease no one’s hurt (aside from Bossuet’s singed eyebrows from when Enjolras reflexively summons a massive fireball when he is enraged over a comment by someone on one of the shows. Bossuet’s equally reflexive attempt to gain control over the fire hadn’t worked either, had just ended with the fireball drifting closer to his face as both he and Enjolras tries to control it. The unwanted fireball lingers for a good three minutes, barely avoiding lighting Jehan’s curtains on fire, until Jehan pulls out his otamatone, and plays the highest note he can, the one he’s heard described by one Amazon reviewer as ‘the sound of a drunken, very loud mosquito.’ Both Enjolras’s and Bossuet’s attention successfully diverted, the fireball disappears. Still better than the Combeferre’s Earthquake Incident a few months ago.)

 

It is one of the most successful monthly movie nights yet.Jehan decides, surveying his friends, most of which have fallen asleep in positions of varying comfort in his living room: Gavroche is using Grantaire as a pillow and Eponine as a footrest; Joly (his cane leaning against Musichetta's foot), Bossuet, and Musichetta have commandeered a chair that the three of them shouldn’t fit in, not according to  _ normal _ physics, anyway; and is sprawled over Cosette’s lap.  _ I’m fine, _ she mouths to Jehan. When he asks if she wants him to help her move Marius somehow. 

 

He gathers his pillow and blanket, and changes into pajamas: it’s late, and he’s tired, and it doesn’t feel right to sleep in his bed when all his friends are asleep in his living room like this.

On the end table, the two cups of tea that Joly made sit, forgotten.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally a piece to help me figure out more about their powers from my previous fic in this series, but *shrugs* movies and pizza and oddly named cats happened.
> 
> [ This](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otamatone) is an otamatone. [ This](https://youtu.be/lLbxL-nIH9Y) is "One Day More" played on the otamatone. I highly recommend listening to it.
> 
> Comments make me super happy <3


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